The Nook Simple Touch is great for reading ebooks. It's got plenty of storage, it's small enough to carry anywhere, can be used with one hand, can hold tons of books, its e-ink display is crisp and easy to read, and most importantly, it runs a skinned and customized version of Android behind Barnes and Noble's interface. I got my hands on one a couple of weeks ago from a friend, and with about a half-hour, some basic tools, and a little patience, I turned my new Nook into a solid starter Android tablet with complete access to the Android Market, Google apps, your email, and the web. Here's how.

Rooting the Nook Simple Touch is surprisingly easy, and the results are more than worth it. As with all projects of this nature, a bricked device is one possible outcome, and you'll definitely void your warranty. it worked like a charm for me though (as you can see in the video above), and just like rooting an Android phone, it's well worth the risk—especially considering how deceptively easy it is.

Update: The instructions in this post apply if your Nook is running firmware 1.2.0 or below. If your Nook is running newer firmware, or you run into issues rooting, check out Matthew Acton's post here which outlines how to modify these instructions for newer Nooks, and check out the NookDevs wiki for additional resources and downloads.

What You'll Need

Here's a list of the things you'll need to root your Nook and get access to the Android Market, Amazon Appstore, and start tweaking and customizing your device:

One Barnes and Noble Nook Simple Touch, available for $99 retail, cheaper if you're buying used (I got mine for a sweet $20, Thanks Fraize!) The Nook must be registered to a Barnes and Noble account.

An external microSD card reader or microSD to SD card adapter for your computer's built-in reader. I used one similar to this $7 model at Amazon that I picked up at an electronics store.

A Google account, preferably the one you used for your Barnes and Noble account, and preferably one with YouTube linked to it (more on this later.) Having one will speed up the process of authenticating to the Android Market and getting your Nook added to your Google account.

Nooter, a utility for rooting and enabling market access on your Nook Simple Touch, and a method to write disk images to your microSD card, like win32DiskImager for Windows. Mac and Linux users can use the terminal.

Step One: Root the Nook Simple Touch

There are several tools available to root the Nook, but I used a handy utility called TouchNooter, and followed an excellent guide over at the XDA-developers forum. Part of the reason I picked TouchNooter is because it doesn't just root your device, but it also installs some helpful utilities you'll need once you're up and running. Plus, unlike some of the other tools available, TouchNooter works with all versions of the Nook firmware.

You'll also need a utility to write disk images to your SD card. I used my Windows machine to do this, so I downloaded win32DiskImager. The following steps assume you're using Windows, but we'll get to Mac and Linux in a moment.

Plug in your microSD card to your card reader, and confirm it's mounted to your computer. We're going to wipe it, so back up any files from it you may want now!

If you haven't already, extract the Nooter disk image from the archive, and put it somewhere you can find it. The desktop works.

Extract all of the files from the win32DiskImager archive and drop them in the same place. Double-click Win32DiskImager.exe to run the program. As long as all of the other files in the archive are in the same place, it should open without issue. You may get an error message about a device being in use—acknowledge it and move on.

Point the "Device" drop-down menu at the drive letter assigned to your microSD card.

Click the folder icon and select the TouchNooter image file to write to the SD card

Take a deep breath and click "Write." This will wipe your sdCard and write the TouchNooter disk image to it.

When it's finished, dismount the microSD card, remove it from the reader, and grab your nook.

That's the hard part, actually. Mac and Linux users can write the disk image to their microSD cards at the terminal using the "dd" command to write the image. Even though they use a different rooting utility for the job, the instructions at NookDevs.com to root the Simple Touch explain the terminal commands clearly—just be careful you're writing to your microSD card and not an attached hard drive on your system.

It's important to use some kind of external SD card reader for this task. Trying to write to the microSD card while it's in your Nook and attached via USB, or some other device connected to your computer with an SD slot in it (a camera, a smartphone, or some other device) will cause problems, and most people who complained about bricked Nooks pointed to this as the reason it happened. Let's continue.

Power down your Nook.

Open the microSD hatch on the side, and remove the card inside. Set this off to the side, you'll need it again in a moment.

Install the microSD card with the TouchNooter image on it, close the hatch, and turn on your Nook.

You'll see a TouchNooter splash screen. TouchNooter is working its magic behind the scenes, and it'll advise you to wait until the screen flashes dark before doing anything else. Be patient.

When the screen flashes dark, your Nook is rooted! TouchNooter has turned the device off for you. Open the hatch and remove the TouchNooter microSD card. Install the microSD card that you set to the side.

Power on your Nook. The first thing you'll be presented with is whether you want to go to the Nook launcher or ADW Launcher, which TouchNooter took the liberty of installing for you.

That's all there is to it. If you've followed along up to this point, you now have a fully rooted Nook Simple Touch. Still, there are a few things left to do to set up your device before you can make the most of it.

Step Two: Configure Your Newly Rooted Nook

As soon as you turn the device on, you may be prompted to log in to your Google Account. If you are, skip it—we're not ready for that yet. The first thing you want to do is connect to a Wi-Fi network, if your device wasn't connected to one before you rooted it. Mine was, so it remembered my wireless settings after I turned it back on.

By default, the "n" hardware button at the bottom of your nook will bring up the Nook system menu—the one Barnes and Noble installed. The NookTouchTools app (which TouchNooter also installed for you) lets you change this, and you can set the button to be your "home" button if you like. I actually prefer it set to the Nook system menu—it means I can quickly get back to my book or the Nook software whenever I choose, effectively giving me a one-button switch out of "tablet mode" and back into "Nook mode." The status bar at the top of the Nook is the same as it was before—you can still tap the book icon to go back to the page in the book you were reading last. The "back" and "menu" buttons in the status bar will work anywhere, including the home screen and app drawer.

NookTouchTools also allows you to configure the hardware buttons on the left and ride sides of the Nook to do whatever you like. At the very least, familiarize yourself with the defaults. You also get a transparent Button Savior menu that sits on top of any running apps that will quickly take you back to the home screen or bring up the menu in any app. Once you have the controls down (or configured to your tastes,) it's time to finish the setup.

Open Gmail (already installed) or Youtube (already installed) and log in to your Google account. If you use YouTube, your phone will sync your Gmail without you having to log in to the app, and will add your Nook to your Market account. If you have any new messages, they'll be available from the notifications button in the status menu at the top of the screen.

Go ahead and try to access the Android Market. It will likely fail right away, but wait about a day and the Market will let you in. Honestly, I'm not certain why there's the one-day lag, but the developer behind TouchNooter notes that future updates will fix this.

You don't need the Android Market anyway—you have the Amazon Appstore! Open it and download any apps you want right out of the gate. I started with Dropbox so I could side-load APKs that I wanted to install, like the Kindle app. More on this later.

At this point, your Nook is connected to your Google account, will fetch your email for you and let you browse the web (Opera Mini is pre-installed, but feel free to install any browser you like)like any other Android device. Of course, you can still read your Nook books on it. If you've waited a day, you'll see your Nook in your list of Android devices in the Android Market, and you can push apps to it. Congratulations—your Nook is rooted and pulling double-duty as a tablet and an ereader!

Step Three: Load Up the Ebooks

You can stop here if you like, but one of the biggest reasons I chose to root my Nook Touch is so I could read Nook books, Kindle books, Google books, and any other books I wanted to on an e-ink display. I also wanted light tablet features, like email, a little Twitter, maybe some Google+, and light web browsing. I got the latter immediately upon rooting, but let's talk about the former.

Now that you have access to the Market, you can install any ereader you prefer. We're partial to Aldiko, but many of you prefer Moon+, among others. Go ahead and install it.

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The Amazon Kindle app for Android gave me some trouble. Unfortunately, even in the Amazon Appstore, the Nook didn't show as a compatible device for the Kindle app for Android. Market access wasn't enabled yet, so I couldn't try installing it through the Market. Thankfully, APKs for the Amazon Kindle app are available at Freeware Lovers. The most current version of the Kindle app, 3.3.1.1, didn't want to install, and I had to back up to version 3.0.1.70 to get a version that would install properly. I downloaded the APK and side-loaded it through my Dropbox. Once the Kindle app was installed, it worked like a charm. I could log in, access my books and documents I'd sent to my account, and most importantly, read those books on my e-ink display.

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Others at the XDA-developers forum have noted similar problems with the Kindle app. Some say waiting for Market access will fix the problem, others took my approach. I was impatient, so if you have time to wait, you may try the market. If it doesn't work though, my method is surefire.

Step Four: Optimize Your E-Ink Display

The last tweak I made to my tablet was inspired by this post at the XDA-developers forum, where user marspeople built an app that drastically improves the response time of your e-ink display. You sacrifice the grayscale depth, and you may be eating battery life while the toggle is active (I didn't notice that much drain, but it was definitely faster than otherwise) but the ends do justify the means: your Nook's display will respond much faster than before.

Marspeople's packaged an APK that you can download in this thread. Once installed, launch it, and turn on fast refresh with a four-tap sequence that took me a while to get used to (four successive taps on the screen, in any app, starting in one place and then each tap down and to the right of the last tap.) Once you master it, you can toggle fast refresh on and off whenever you want it.

The video here shows a rooted Nook running games like Angry Birds—I wouldn't recommend that, the e-ink display just isn't good enough for full-motion gaming, but it is great for surfing the web, scrolling through your inbox, or flipping pages in your ebooks that much faster, if the response time is a bit too slow for you. It's definitely a hack, and it falls in the "highly experimental" category, but if you really want to power up your newly rooted Nook, give it a shot.

Reap the Benefits

The Nook Simple Touch is a great ereader, and with a little time and energy, you can turn it into a pretty decent Android tablet. Keep its limitations in mind though—you're not going to turn the e-ink display into a color screen, you're not going to hack the thing to the point where you can play full-motion games on it, and you're not going to compose your next masterpiece on it.

You will, however, make a great ereader even better, and drastically increase the bang you get for your $99 bucks (or less, if you can find one used.) Instead of just a touch-sensitive ereader, you get a real, portable Android tablet with access to the Market, your email, your social networks, Google docs, multiple ebook stores and ereaders, Dropbox, any anything else you care to do with it (in fact, we have some suggestions for you here). If an e-ink based ereader is up your alley, but you wish you could find one that can at least pull its weight for other tasks, and considering the Kindle Touch is the same price and nowhere near as useful once rooted, we'd say it's worth the money if you want the best of both worlds.